The Souls of Black Folk
ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of
them sit in hopeless serfdom. For these there is one other avenue of
escape toward which they have turned in increasing numbers, namely,
migration to town. A glance at the distribution of land among the black
owners curiously reveals this fact. In 1898 the holdings were as
follows: Under forty acres, forty-nine families; forty to two hundred
and fifty acres, seventeen families; two hundred and fifty to one
thousand acres, thirteen families; one thousand or more acres, two
families. Now in 1890 there were forty-four holdings, but only nine of
these were under forty acres. The great increase of holdings, then, has
come in the buying of small homesteads near town, where their owners
really share in the town life; this is a part of the rush to town. And
for every land-owner who has thus hurried away from the narrow and hard
conditions of country life, how many field-hands, how many tenants, how
many ruined renters, have joined that long procession? Is it not
strange compensation? The sin of the country districts is visited on
the town, and the social sores of city life to-day may, here in
Dougherty County, and perhaps in many places near and far, look for
their final healing without the city walls.
IX.
Of the Sons of Master and Man
Life treads on life, and heart on heart;
We press too close in church and mart
To keep a dream or grave apart.
MRS. BROWNING.
The world-old phenomenon of the contact of diverse races of men is to
have new exemplification during the new century. Indeed, the
characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with
the world’s undeveloped peoples. Whatever we may say of the results of
such contact in the past, it certainly forms a chapter in human action
not pleasant to look back upon. War, murder, slavery, extermination,
and debauchery,—this has again and again been the result of carrying
civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the
heathen without the law. Nor does it altogether satisfy the conscience
of the modern world to be told complacently that all this has been
right and proper, the fated triumph of strength over weakness, of
righteousness over evil, of superiors over inferiors. It would
certainly be soothing if one could readily believe all this; and yet
there are too many ugly facts for everything to be thus easily
explained away. We feel and know that there are many delicate
differences in race psychology, numberless changes that our crude
social measurements are not yet able to follow minutely, which explain
much of history and social development. At the same time, too, we know
that these considerations have never adequately explained or excused
the triumph of brute force and cunning over weakness and innocence.
It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century
to see that in the future competition of races the survival of the
fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the
true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that
is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium
on greed and impudence and cruelty. To bring this hope to fruition, we
are compelled daily to turn more and more to a conscientious study of
the phenomena of race-contact,—to a study frank and fair, and not
falsified and colored by our wishes or our fears. And we have in the
South as fine a field for such a study as the world affords,—a field,
to be sure, which the average American scientist deems somewhat beneath
his dignity, and which the average man who is not a scientist knows all
about, but nevertheless a line of study which by reason of the enormous
race complications with which God seems about to punish this nation
must increasingly claim our sober attention, study, and thought, we
must ask, what are the actual relations of whites and blacks in the
South? and we must be answered, not by apology or fault-finding, but by
a plain, unvarnished tale.
In the civilized life of to-day the contact of men and their relations
to each other fall in a few main lines of action and communication:
there is, first, the physical proximity of home and dwelling-places,
the way in which neighborhoods group themselves, and the contiguity of
neighborhoods. Secondly, and in our age chiefest, there are the
economic relations,—the methods by which individuals cooperate for
earning a living, for the mutual satisfaction of wants, for the
production of wealth. Next, there are the political relations, the
cooperation in social control, in group government, in laying and
paying the burden of taxation. In the fourth place there are the less
tangible but highly important forms of intellectual contact and
commerce, the interchange of ideas through conversation and conference,
through periodicals and libraries; and, above all, the gradual
formation for each community of that curious _tertium quid_ which we
call public opinion. Closely allied with this come the various forms of
social contact in everyday life, in travel, in theatres, in house
gatherings, in marrying and giving in marriage. Finally, there are the
varying forms of religious enterprise, of moral teaching and benevolent
endeavor. These are the principal ways in which men living in the same
communities are brought into contact with each other. It is my present
task, therefore, to indicate, from my point of view, how the black race
in the South meet and mingle with the whites in these matters of
everyday life.
First, as to physical dwelling. It is usually possible to draw in
nearly every Southern community a physical color-line on the map, on
the one side of which whites dwell and on the other Negroes. The
winding and intricacy of the geographical color-line varies, of course,
in different communities. I know some towns where a straight line drawn
through the middle of the main street separates nine-tenths of the
whites from nine-tenths of the blacks. In other towns the older
settlement of whites has been encircled by a broad band of blacks; in
still other cases little settlements or nuclei of blacks have sprung up
amid surrounding whites. Usually in cities each street has its
distinctive color, and only now and then do the colors meet in close
proximity. Even in the country something of this segregation is
manifest in the smaller areas, and of course in the larger phenomena of
the Black Belt.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural
clustering by social grades common to all communities. A Negro slum may
be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter, while it is
quite common to find a white slum planted in the heart of a respectable
Negro district. One thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the
whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like
close proximity. It thus happens that in nearly every Southern town and
city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of each other. This
is a vast change from the situation in the past, when, through the
close contact of master and house-servant in the patriarchal big house,
one found the best of both races in close contact and sympathy, while
at the same time the squalor and dull round of toil among the
field-hands was removed from the sight and hearing of the family. One
can easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his father’s
parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great city, fails to
grasp or comprehend the whole of the new picture. On the other hand,
the settled belief of the mass of the Negroes that the Southern white
people do not have the black man’s best interests at heart has been
intensified in later years by this continual daily contact of the
better class of blacks with the worst representatives of the white
race.
Coming now to the economic relations of the races, we are on ground
made familiar by study, much discussion, and no little philanthropic
effort. And yet with all this there are many essential elements in the
cooperation of Negroes and whites for work and wealth that are too
readily overlooked or not thoroughly understood. The average American
can easily conceive of a rich land awaiting development and filled with
black laborers. To him the Southern problem is simply that of making
efficient workingmen out of this material, by giving them the requisite
technical skill and the help of invested capital. The problem, however,
is by no means as simple as this, from the obvious fact that these
workingmen have been trained for centuries as slaves. They exhibit,
therefore, all the advantages and defects of such training; they are
willing and good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident, or careful.
If now the economic development of the South is to be pushed to the
verge of exploitation, as seems probable, then we have a mass of
workingmen thrown into relentless competition with the workingmen of
the world, but handicapped by a training the very opposite to that of
the modern self-reliant democratic laborer. What the black laborer
needs is careful personal guidance, group leadership of men with hearts
in their bosoms, to train them to foresight, carefulness, and honesty.
Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial differences to
prove the necessity of such group training after the brains of the race
have been knocked out by two hundred and fifty years of assiduous
education in submission, carelessness, and stealing. After
Emancipation, it was the plain duty of some one to assume this group
leadership and training of the Negro laborer. I will not stop here to
inquire whose duty it was—whether that of the white ex-master who had
profited by unpaid toil, or the Northern philanthropist whose
persistence brought on the crisis, or the National Government whose
edict freed the bondmen; I will not stop to ask whose duty it was, but
I insist it was the duty of some one to see that these workingmen were
not left alone and unguided, without capital, without land, without
skill, without economic organization, without even the bald protection
of law, order, and decency,—left in a great land, not to settle down to
slow and careful internal development, but destined to be thrown almost
immediately into relentless and sharp competition with the best of
modern workingmen under an economic system where every participant is
fighting for himself, and too often utterly regardless of the rights or
welfare of his neighbor.
For we must never forget that the economic system of the South to-day
which has succeeded the old regime is not the same system as that of
the old industrial North, of England, or of France, with their
trade-unions, their restrictive laws, their written and unwritten
commercial customs, and their long experience. It is, rather, a copy of
that England of the early nineteenth century, before the factory
acts,—the England that wrung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of
Carlyle. The rod of empire that passed from the hands of Southern
gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their own petulance, has
never returned to them. Rather it has passed to those men who have come
to take charge of the industrial exploitation of the New South,—the
sons of poor whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and power,
thrifty and avaricious Yankees, and unscrupulous immigrants. Into the
hands of these men the Southern laborers, white and black, have fallen;
and this to their sorrow. For the laborers as such, there is in these
new captains of industry neither love nor hate, neither sympathy nor
romance; it is a cold question of dollars and dividends. Under such a
system all labor is bound to suffer. Even the white laborers are not
yet intelligent, thrifty, and well trained enough to maintain